Spore Review

Our review of Will Wright's treatise on intelligent design.

Leave it to iconic game designer and Maxis cofounder Will Wright to one-up his own work on The Sims. While his dollhouse/life-drama simulator became phenomenally successful, he didn't just sit back and collect simoleans. After making a game about human lives, he started working on (and has finally released) Spore, which Wright himself nicknamed "SimEverything," since its focus extends beyond humanity and tackles life on a...well, galactic scale. If you really need a quick one-line summary of what Spore is, I guess I'd describe it as "intelligent design via minigames." The Spore "plot" (it's got one, honest) is about your species' multistage journey from panspermia all the way to the center of the galaxy. You start your run of minigames with the Cell stage (where you're just a single-celled organism munching at whatever you can get) and work your way through the Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space stages.

This era-spanning scope allows for Spore to feel like a different game at any particular moment, depending on what stage you're in. To use the language of other games, the Cell stage resembles flOw (but with more purpose); the Creature stage feels like a mashup of World of WarCraft, The Sims, and, er, Simon Says; the Tribal stage plays like an elementary real-time strategy game; the Civilization stage is sort of like a real-time version of, well, Civilization; and finally, the Space stage makes me feel like I'm in a hybrid of Master of Orion and Wing Commander: Privateer.

Click the image above to check out all Spore screens.

Earlier, I used the word "minigames," because -- with the exception of Space (and Civilization, depending on your strategy) -- each stage isn't very long, and the learning curves are quite gentle. The Cell stage just focuses on eating and occasionally modifying your organism (which starts with just an eye and a mouth...but you can start customizing your little paramecium with flagella, additional mouths, and so forth) to set a basic template for your evolution. The Creature stage adds some limited social interaction -- you can either hunt creatures to extinction or play a Simon Says-type sequence to socialize and gain allies. The Tribal stage refines on the aggression/social dynamic while adding mild base-building and unit specialties (such as gatherers versus hunters), and the Civilization stage adds vehicles and basic city management while also further defining your species' specialties (economic, military, and religious -- which I'll discuss in just a moment). Then you reach the immensity that is the Space stage.

Heck, the previous four stages almost feel like extended tutorials for the Space segment; I breezed through the pre-Space stuff in about four hours, but the Space portion easily takes up 10 hours on its own. The "story" becomes more pronounced (you zip out into space to investigate some big, bad aliens), and you suddenly find yourself dealing with a lot of stuff, such as terraforming planets, establishing colonies, maintaining diplomatic relations with multiple empires, and setting up a steady economy. Even though you only pilot a single ship (you can create a fleet via alliances with other alien empires), at any moment, you might be zapping at pirates, transplanting flora and fauna from one planet to another, selling and trading materials like some sort of space haberdasher, or (literally) painting the sky blue. Then again, perhaps it's some sort of meta-commentary that sustaining a species in space is much, much more complicated than making sure a tribe of yokels has food for the night.

Click the image above to check out all Spore screens.

And your actions have ripple effects throughout. A quick example: My little cell used a beak to eat meat, which eventually resulted in late-stage bonuses such as firebombs in the Tribal stage or discounted weapons in the Space stage. This sense of choice and persistence helps give Spore that same sensation as guiding a single character through multiple RPGs (think Baldur's Gate) or even taking a World of WarCraft character to level 70.

While numerous little bonuses and tweaks stem from your gameplay decisions, you can still essentially divide the core game into three broad strokes/generalizations: In the Space segment, carnivores evolve into military regimes, omnivores become economic powerhouses, and herbivores evolve into religious zealots (when you actually think about it, that last one provides an amusing springboard for debate).

In summary: Spore's epic and encompassing, with lots of moving parts. Some problems do crop up, though. For one thing, Spore's vastness works against it; since the overall game's so damn big, the individual parts feel extremely shallow. The actual gameplay gets really repetitive -- even for casual gamers (Spore's obvious target audience). Whether you're performing the same sequence of dances and hoots for social behavior in Creature or defending your homeworld from angry aliens for the umpteenth time in Space, you find yourself doing the same things...a lot.

Click the image above to check out all Spore screens.

The simplistic A.I., which usually spams lots of enemy units and is easily bested by spamming units right back at it, adds to the repetition. Minor annoyances -- like the save system (only one save slot...which never autosaves) or the third-person camera and time limits in certain Space missions rendering them nigh impossible -- build up aggravation. I've also experienced a fair share of glitches involving missions, such as killing seven creatures but the game only registering two...or being told to abduct a certain species into my ship, even though I already have 10 in the cargo hold. Hopefully, this stuff gets corrected in a postrelease patch.

While Spore's got its highs and lows as a game, it's still a genuinely new and interesting piece of software. Fact is, Spore's most fascinating aspect isn't its epic scope or its imperfect juggling of multiple genres...but that it is, paradoxically, a community/social-network-driven game where you don't actually interact with other people. You won't find an actual "multiplayer mode"; Spore's social foundation is based on sharing and social networking (via the in-game buddy list and "Sporecasts") -- so while you never connect directly with other players, the game shares their content with you (and every other player). It's a community -- and it's driven without any actual contact.

If anything, Spore isn't so much a game as it is an outlet of expression. The fact that you customize nearly everything, from your species' biology (from Cell to Creature) to clothing (Tribal and Civilization) to buildings and vehicles (Civilization and Space), makes Spore a much better "this is how I think" indicator than even the way people design their houses and families in The Sims. While my species and vehicles tend to be of the "I'm just throwing body parts together" mold, my coworker and 1UP.com PC editor-in-chief Jeff Green is oddly obsessed with making a universe full of ducks (to give one example of how bizarrely creative you can get). Now that I've seen this sort of creativity -- and now that the game is out and fellow players are mocking my lame creatures and vehicles -- I'm more inclined to, you know, try to craft something rather than just jam stuff together. Heck, I get a kick out of simply seeing a particular bizarre creature someone made (the last crazy thing I saw was a race of bikers made by some guy with Cyrillic letters in his name), even if I don't interact with it.

Click the image above to check out all Spore screens.

Since game sessions are randomly populated with other users' creations, Spore becomes even riper than The Sims for goofy player-generated stories. For instance, one of Jeff's weird duck-people evolved into a rival tribe that attempted to raid my camp for food; I told him about how, in my universe, I wiped his ducks off the map in retaliation. Likewise, in his own game, Jeff took down an epic Nomnom (a giant 1,000-hit-point version of my species) on his homeworld...and let my beloved Manga race become extinct because he was too busy recoloring a planet. But I still have the last laugh, as he claims my spaceships regularly fly in to abduct his ducks.

As I mentioned earlier, strictly as a game, Spore's a flawed effort in five different genres, smushed together in a casual-player-friendly manner. But as a tangible representation of intelligent design, with an emphasis on creation and sharing, it falls perfectly in line with the rest of Will Wright's work. It's not a perfect game, but it's definitely one that any serious gamer should try.